Ponderings of a bookworm

Being that I've been working hard on my own book, my thoughts have often turned to the question of "What makes a good book?" As I pace around the track at the park every morning I'm not thinking of what I'm going to write about or what references to pull out. Instead I'm usually thinking about how long each chapter should be, what sort of spacing or font I should use, what images might be useful, and generally how to make the book pleasant to read rather than trying to cram in every last bit of information possible. Some of these questions are too trivial to worry about now, but I know from experience that there is more to a good book than whatever new information you might bring to the table.

As often happens, a recent comment made by Blake has got me pondering what I hope to accomplish with my writing;

To make a horribly grandiose analogy: science popularizers are like doctors. While a doctor works to eliminate disease, the source of their employment, a science popularizer seeks to educate and inspire, to touch lives and make people see the world a little differently. One of those lives we touch might be a young person who grows up and becomes a scientist and makes our old explanation obsolete. Occupational hazard! :-)

As I remarked yesterday, I know that whatever I write some of the information will become outdated within a year, perhaps even before the book makes it onto shelves. I'm not going to let that discourage me; that's just part of the way science works (and I'm certainly happy that is so!). My main goal in writing is to get people interested, to share the sense of awe I feel about nature, and that has less to do with how up-to-date the book is than the way I present the information. Accuracy is certainly a top concern of mine (I've gone to great pains to try and correct some common errors and not make any new ones), but if the book is so boring as to be unreadable then my efforts were essentially a waste.

I think "sharing" is a good word to describe my motivation for another reason. Technical literature is often beyond the grasp of many people (both in terms of content and the money required to keep up with all the journals), and there is a huge collection of work that many people never hear about. More specifically, I'm thinking of symposia books and edited volumes of technical papers like The Emergence of Whales, The Beginning of the Age of Mammals, Evolution of Tertiary Mammals of North America: Volume 2, Small Mammals, Xenarthrans, and Marine Mammals, Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs: Origins, Evolution, and Structure, Mesozoic Birds etc., just to name a few that I've tried to get information from lately. (I did track down a cheap copy of The Emergence of Whales, but the rest are generally too new to be affordable.) It may be possible to find such books in libraries, but unless you're someone who is actively interested in the subject material and tracks them down the information within them may as well not exist. The fact that the interest in such books is minimal also means that used copies cost almost as much as new ones, so even outdated information can be costly.

Even in terms of more readily available journal papers plenty of work is forgotten. Summaries are written from older summaries with new information slotted in here and there in many popular books, and rarely is a new synthesis written from the ground up. Such a synthesis is what I am attempting. There is so much interesting information that has been scattered throughout the technical and popular literature, and I want to make sure I fully appreciate the changing history of science as I'm writing (and not just get words on the page because I feel I have to).

Given these considerations I have been trying to think of science books that I consider "classic," works that impressed me with the style & clarity of writing even if the information was sometimes outdated. G.G. Simpson's The Meaning of Evolution, W.E. le Gros Clark's Antecedents of Man, the numerous collections of Stephen Jay Gould's essays, T.H. Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, and Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World all gave me moments of pause where I was nearly struck dumb with the insight of the authors. I'm sure not everyone would pick the same books (and I just picked those few off the top of my head), but they all gave rise to plenty of astonished, excited moments. Such moments are ones I want to recreate for the hypothetical readers of the book I'm working on now.

If I wanted to do things the traditional way I would construct a timeline of the history of life and climb, rung by rung, up the "ladder of life" until I peered over the top to see Homo sapiens reaching out to the angels. While human evolution is going to make up the last chapter of the book before the conclusion (any argument about evolution is inextricably tied to the questions of our own origins, after all), I don't want to take the conventional route. Frankly, it can get quite boring. I've decided to follow my passions instead, to pick examples that I think are interesting but also provide lessons about evolution in general, and I can only hope what may seem like a random selection of twigs from the evolutionary bush looks beautiful when all bound together.